New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  I’m not sure exactly when I first became aware of it. This didn’t happen all at once. It was a gradual process. But when I did see the thing clearly and for what it was, there seemed little mistaking it for anything else, and I felt quite sure that it wasn’t a part of me.

  Now the self, as I’ve come to know it, is hardly any one thing, so to say too much about what it definitely is and isn’t seems a little presumptuous, I know. It is a conundrum. But as one recognizes the face of a friend, and as one knows one’s own face in the mirror, and sees the two as different, yet both familiar, one can say much the same about the mind, and what belongs to the self and what doesn’t. Mosquito didn’t – not to me – yet it was there in my mind, all the same, and it seemed that it always had been. It was as familiar as the inside of my eyelids. Which introduces a whole other level of paradox concerning who or what belongs to which, and what doesn’t, but there is one thing I can say with unequivocal certainty:

  Mosquito was old. Very old. Mosquito was a very, very old thing. This was something that I knew.

  Mosquito had been in my mind, I think, for longer than my mind had been there, for longer than this thing I called “I” had even existed. It doesn’t seem as if that should be possible, but it is, because the mind is a place of paradox if nothing else. That made me the alien in this subtle terrain.

  How did I know all this? It was necessary to look at the thing itself. I had to study it, to see its form, to get to really know what I could about it. Such scrutiny is not properly what meditation is for, not in Soto Zen practice, but when a thing presents itself, as Mosquito did, and it doesn’t go away – not yet, not yet – but simply sits there front and center, then to sit with it is the proper practice, and so I lingered. I was there; it was there. We abided in mutual being. Really, it couldn’t be avoided. It rested in a self-stamped indent in the soft ground of my mind and occupied space. Round, solid – it looked to be made of metal, rough and gray – it was a perfect, dull, metallic sphere. I couldn’t tell its size because size, in a place like that, is awfully difficult to judge. It may have been large or it may have been wee-teeny-tiny; both could appear much the same because the mind plays tricks. Its matte surface, though not so shiny, still reflected much of the light that, as such, was cast upon it, and though it didn’t move, not at all in fact, it did – how can I put this? – it did seem to vibrate really fast. It had a quality of oscillation, yet so fast and so slight that it couldn’t be seen doing this. Yet I knew all the same that it was. I could feel it, and that was one thing about it.

  I realize that in presenting these various and illogical and contradictory qualities, it may seem as if I’m only presenting fantasies and imaginings of the mind. This is so. It is true. But the things of the mind are also things, insofar as the mind is a thing, and the mind, ultimately, may be the only thing that I or anyone has. But Mosquito was – and this I’m well certain of – not native to my mind, though it was there and had been for a very long time. So that was one other thing about it.

  But the most troubling thing about Mosquito, though it was in my mind, while not strictly of it – much as I had once dwelt (and would dwell again) in this wide-open world of events, things and people, though no more a part of that – was that it was there, while different from it, being itself not my mind, but then, later, and far worse, it was not there anymore, and then there was thereafter only my mind, and nothing else, and that was what destroyed me.

  •

  In near-dark I found the orb. It took only a few minutes to reach it, or until it had reached me, vividly present, sharp in its outline, spherical and massive while at the same time content to rest lightly at one side, as if sitting next to me along the perimeter. I wanted to laugh, but settled instead for shifting just a little on my small bench, rustling my body to try to work the agitation out. It often did that, often struck me as funny, though to be honest, its jokes were always so entirely over my head, and the closer that I got to it, the closer that I looked at it, the more warped and disturbed and unreal I felt, as if I were suddenly at the bottom of a bucket, looking up at everything through a fisheye lens.

  The others around me, likewise in silence, worked at their minds as they faced sections of wall in the still-cold Buddha Hall; shapes at the peripheries, insofar as I saw them through the corners of my eyes, if at all, approximating stillness in varied degrees. Oftentimes I might feel them too, their similar presence, a slight tickling, though I perhaps only imagined it. But today I felt I was alone; among the others, sure, but to myself and enclosed, if edgeless. This was neither better nor worse, in itself, just a condition. There were always… conditions. I found, as usual, that the vibrant morning dark of the hall was entirely unlike the cold inward light that reflected off Mosquito’s surface – imaginary, yes, but still… – curving over from a single specular highlight out of one focused point near the top, then grading back over gently, over its brushed metal, roundly expanding, silver to dim to near-black, and then to black underneath. It rested in black, though I’d long ago come to recognize the color of my own mind as a deep, rich brown, as warm as this shade was cold and arid.

  And will you touch it? Yes then, I will try. I would first put out my hand. But the approach is not so simple. There are distortions. My head feels as though inflated if I grow close, and the closer I get, the more inflated, and the more bent everything becomes from the pressure inside, and I feel the burning. Yes, the burning. I might be weightless, but I am at least on fire. There are, from what I understand, these tiny pinpoints of light? Some are swirling. That’s from… because it’s… getting closer. It knows my mind quite well, but I can’t seem to… it’s… Touching us. That’s right. From the inside. Heaven is on the inside, right? Touching us from the inside. The inside bodies, the golden bodies, the tear or crack, and look, it’s full of numbers, it’s full of words and numbers, the – cracking open, bone or skin, the burn of skin or hair, the smell of burning hair, the meat-smell of singeing mindstuff look you are open mindstuff look look – inside or in front of – heaven is what burns the inward golden body look I know I can’t contain this look look, eyes pop open, mouth pops open, there is nothing left inside us so there is nothing left to burn, look look… Bring me this one. Which one? This one. He seems struck dumb. Yes then that’s the one I want. But isn’t this one…? Yes, the Golden Body. You won’t look twice at that, because he is invisible. The mouth and eyes burst open when the head oh if only the violence to the head would be one day soon ceasing because the mind yes inside yes was singed. Why does he look at us like that? Eyes popped open, mouth drooped open, the face loose, the skin lined, cheeks turned to jowls. See, he’s old now, very very old now. He knows no better. He knows nothing in fact. There is violence and freedom in fact in nothing. Good persons are these, all at once, all us, all inside the Golden Body as one.

  •

  My name is not Proteus, but that is what I call myself. I am a sea creature. I am adept at assigning names.

  I gave Mosquito its name by a means not dissimilar, though also not the same, as how I received my own. I saw the thing for what it was. And though Mosquito is just as surely not its real name any more than Proteus is my own, the name fits. It is the right name. It describes something essential.

  As gradual as my discovery of Mosquito had been – like a steel submarine rising imperceptibly from the deep; you can only just see it, there, vague and uncertain, a shape through the waves from the dark, and by degrees it gains in definition, it pulls itself together, a surprising clarity of shape, edge, and angle, until it cracks at last through the surface with undeniable violence – its disappearance was just as sudden, certain, and cruel.

  In late October, rains, chill, and dark skies mark the change in the air, the gradual slide towards winter. The ground is wet but not frozen. Wind rattles loose the remaining leaves from skeletal trees in rust-colored swirls, while tall pines spike toward the mottling cloud cover above, their tapered peaks hidden within their own numbers.
From the window of the dining room, the mountain beyond the nearby freeway slopes gently forward to a snow-softened cap and, though distant, its edges are clear and sharp, a knife-cut through the clear air, and it seems somehow more present to the room and firmly dominant in it than the U-shaped arrangement of tables and chairs that it contains or the black iron heat-stove by the door. The feast to be set for the Feeding of the Hungry Ghosts was yet in preparation in the kitchen – bread rolls and small cakes and cream puffs, these we made ourselves, I and the head cook, the Reverend Destabile, also gifts from the community, no meat, nothing with garlic – all to be set in a great pile in the temple. We the living would eat regular meals until after the ceremony, once the ghosts had done with their share with these, their gifts. The dead typically didn’t take much, however, and we could expect a good dessert, or at least afternoon tea.

  Visitors from the lay community outside came and filled the guesthouse, in the case of this month’s retreat nearly to capacity, which amounted to a dozen bodies, two to a room. It was by now my ninth year at the Abbey, and in my current role as guestmaster (only for certain occasions filling in with the baking any longer, having become the de facto pastry specialist) I’d reviewed each visitor’s application and knew for instance that Vivianne, a slender and dark-haired woman near to my own age, had come, with her battered suitcase, large fabric purse (if something so patchwork and shapeless could be called a purse) and her guitar case, which presumably also contained a guitar, from Seattle, my own home city. I knew that she did not consider herself a Buddhist, Soto Zen or any other sort, though she’d practiced meditation, off and on, for years. I knew that she had some history, perhaps even professionally, with the Tarot. I couldn’t hold that against her, though it was the sort of thing that might raise red flags in the application process. I knew – at least, she had claimed – that she was not currently taking any medications or illegal drugs.

  I picked her and two others up from the nearby town where the train stopped, where I found them each standing, separate and expectant and individual islands of anxious uncertainty, unaware yet of their allegiances to one another or that they all waited for the same thing, near to the wooden shack beside the rails, which was the extent of the Dunsmuir station. Helping Vivianne and the others – as there was also a small and spritely man with a well-trimmed beard and pastel-colored cotton pants, and another woman, older, whose sandy hair and face at first I couldn’t get a fix on, but which I came to think of later as kind – to get their luggage into the hatchback of the ancient Subaru, I decided to not say anything yet about the guitar, not in front of these other two, but to take it up with her later at the house when I could get her alone.

  We drove the seven miles of back road to the Abbey, Vivianne in the front seat beside me. The other two, quite naturally it seemed, had gravitated into the back. When I asked her, making awkward small conversation, what she did, she smiled winningly, apparently amused. Row after row of sodden brown pine trunks zipped past beyond her, framed within the oblong of the passenger window. “What do I do?” she said, laughing, “Ah, yes, that…” and it was from her that I first learned about the privatized mental-health housing system and Republic Mental Health Residential Agency of Seattle, where she worked. I asked similar questions of my passengers in back, though to be honest, I can’t remember what either of them had to say, though I found myself quickly and inexplicably annoyed by the man in the pastel colors, and tried not to show it.

  Back at the guesthouse, there was a brief check-in procedure for each guest that I conducted from my office, and this was when I brought up the issue of the guitar. “I’m sorry if it wasn’t clear in the application, but you won’t be able to play that here.” I pointed toward the case beside her. “I can keep it for you in the office, if you’d like.”

  “Why not?” She shifted crossly in her chair.

  I slipped into officialdom, as was necessary oftentimes. “The monastery is a place for quiet retreat and reflection. Any evenings and times not scheduled for specific activity are quiet periods, and that means silence. No music, no conversations or other distractions. We ask that our guests not have any radios, personal stereos, no phones, computers, games, or – sorry – guitars or other musical instruments. It’s not that we don’t like your playing –”

  “You haven’t heard my playing.”

  “– but this isn’t the time or the place for it. It’s not personal at all, but this is our policy, and we insist on it.”

  I’d seen any number of responses to this or similar dilemmas before. It was amazing what people came to a monastery expecting – to find, to do, to get away with. But Vivianne’s reaction surprised me.

  “Alright then.” And whatever attitude I’d seen begin to develop over her face was immediately replaced by a look of innocent wonder. She seemed not a woman in her early thirties any longer, but a girl of five, who’d come to the beach and just now seen the ocean for the first time. She stood and leaned across the edge of the desk, beside where I sat, handing the guitar case over to me with complete trust. As she did, her shirt, buttoned only halfway up, fell open just enough to reveal the slope of one small breast, held in its pale blue brassiere, its extrusion of firm nipple in the fabric, through the open V of her neckline. My breath caught in my chest. I could feel the heat from her body against my face, so close. And though I looked directly into her eyes, both wide and dark – green, I noticed, a shade darker than my own – both she and I knew where my attention had fixed. “You keep it, then,” she said, “but I want for you to hear me play sometime, so you’ll know what you’re missing.”

  •

  The time I’d spent with Mosquito – consciously, that is, in meditation with this inner presence, which spoke more vividly and more forcefully than any regular person I’d ever known – could be counted in years; though their numbers with the fingers of a single hand, sure, still, it had by then, by the ceremony of the Feeding of the Hungry Ghosts in late October of 2003, been years.

  I could not look directly at him. Or it. Or them, whatever. I couldn’t look at Mosquito at all, strictly speaking. But if I tried to approach its spherical idea by too direct an avenue, it burned out my mental eye; it was too much. I had to keep myself a little to the side of it, to not pay too close attention, and simply know and feel and understand that it was there. Mosquito, for all of its apparent banality, being essentially a hyper-aware and super-intelligent ball bearing, was also a sentient being, not only developed well beyond myself, but so far beyond what I could psychically endure that trying to approach it too closely threatened to tear me to pieces. It was cold, and impossible, and unutterably dense, and as far as I could tell cared nothing for my safety. Yet the risk seemed worthwhile (unavoidable in fact) as meditating with it promised a form of training I could scarcely imagine, and I found that if I approached it cautiously and came as close as I could, and set myself respectfully beside it, so to speak, Mosquito could share with me a perspective as vast and unimaginable as an exploding star. If I’d come into this sequestered life of the monastery to find anything – anything, that is, beyond refuge from the ill-fit and failed life I’d known previous – it was this. Though I don’t think this relationship could be mistaken for “enlightenment.”

  But it was something.

  I’d kept my mouth shut regarding Mosquito, though I couldn’t say exactly why. No doubt the right, or at least the expected, thing would’ve been to take it up with the Reverend Master in one of my sessions with him. No one in the monastery had ever approached to tell me what exactly I could expect from this prolonged and exhaustive practice of meditation, this life of training away from the daily concerns of the world. For that matter, I hadn’t asked. Of course the popular notion of what we’re here for is Enlightenment, we were looking for Enlightenment, but we didn’t talk about that here. We talked about practice and training, about being awake and mindful and fully present, right exactly there, in the place where we were. The literature was full enough o
f allusions to attainment, the sorts of things that are clear only after you’ve crossed whatever line there is to look back on them: the Master, the Mountain, the Sea. But not this. This? It was instinct for self-protection above all, I suppose, that kept me quiet on the matter. Because maybe if I talked about it, the matter would be explained away. Mosquito would turn to dust in my mind, assuming it was a product of my mind. And if it didn’t, maybe I would be shipped to the nearest state hospital for evaluation. Besides, nobody else spoke of anything like this. This was mine. Mosquito was my special friend, deep inside, and no one else needed to know about it.

  Of course, having a secret like this did something to me. It set me subtly apart from my fellows of the sangha. It made me aware, the way that something or another always had, that I was not like everyone else. This wasn’t good, and I knew it, but I knew at the same time that I needed to keep my silence, that this was too important.

  On the night of the ceremony itself, a Sunday night, the last of the retreat, I again found Vivianne. She stood among the others, beside the man she’d arrived with on the same train, who by now I was thoroughly annoyed with. He wore his spirituality like a pimp’s fur-lined jacket, dripping with ego. He was a show-off, and this whole get-up of his was an act to get laid, but the worst of it was he had Vivianne’s attention. Of course, I wasn’t blind to what was happening in myself. I was screaming with jealousy. I wanted her. As a monk, I’d taken my vow of celibacy – as aware as I could be at the time of exactly what I was giving up – but I was still human, an animal, unavoidably, and I wanted her. Even if I knew that I couldn’t have her, still, I didn’t want this creep to get with Vivianne instead.

  The presentation of pastries that we’d made and other delectables were piled high at the altar. It made a good display. The ghosts were formally invited to come and have their fill. The terrible irony is that hungry ghosts can’t eat, but then that’s what the ceremony is for, to get some food into their growling bellies despite this desperate and impossible condition. Zen people love nothing if not paradox, and the Feeding of the Hungry Ghosts had always been my favorite of our celebrations. I had appetites of my own that I struggled with – Vivianne was hardly the first to walk through the gate and awaken my desires, but it troubled me that I’d not stopped thinking of her once since her arrival four days earlier. It wasn’t just that she’d aroused me, but that she’d known just how to do it, how to get around all my defenses, and so apparently without guile. It was that little-girl smile of such complete wonder. Not that I was anything so impressive to evoke this, but maybe she saw something about me – I don’t know, maybe something standing behind me – that woke that innocence in her. That had completely disarmed me, and she’d moved in, and now I was crazy with it.